In search of lost time.

We enjoyed this video very much, although in the end it told us somewhat less about the ideas of Marx and somewhat more about how wonderfully socially charged many of the classic cartoons actually were.

The more we ponder it, in fact, the more we have begun to wonder about how our world-view was shaped in our childhood years by popular culture. Many of us here at DHAIP long ago read C. S. Lewis's popular children's series about Narnia, recently converted into that weightiest of commodities, a big-budget movie franchise -- revisiting them in later fits of nostalgia, Mr. Lewis's distinctive blend of bluff pipe-smoking neo-Christianity and cozy British xenophobia suddenly became visible. The passages about Narnia's rival kingdom of Calormen and their God Tash, clear nods to the Middle East, are frankly rather racist. (To quote the ever-invaluable Wikipedia: "The Calormenes are described as dark-skinned people with a garlic-scented breath, who wear turbans and pointy slippers and are armed with scimitars.")

In retrospect, Mr. Lewis's allegories now seem only marginally more sophisticated than the brilliantly revolting Chick Comics, those tiny little pamphlets that can still be found for free across the United States -- often in Shoney's, or Denny's, or wherever large, wholesome Christian families congregate. Their peculiar, hate-filled screeds on Islam, Catholicism, and Freemasonry have enlivened many a Sunday buffet lunch.

Our memories, personal and collective, are battle-zones, containing the cheerful anarchism of the Warner Brothers cartoons, the sly cold war subversion of Boris and Natasha, the monarchic fantasist's pornography of Tolkien and his imitators, the strange New Age fascism of the early Star Wars movies, the imperialist pop of Spielberg. And yet these exist in our recollections as vividly or more than the houses we grew up in, the schools we attended, the friends we made, long ago -- and they have shaped us, adding a thousand tiny details to our imaginations that we can no longer distinguish from memory. Our consciousness is an agglomeration of images which we never saw, people we never knew, and places we never walked in.

"My mind goes on containing a great number of cities I have never seen and never will see, names that bear with them a figure or a fragment or glimmer of an imagined figure... the city high above the bay is also there still, with the square enclosing the well, but I can no longer call it by a name, nor remember how I could have ever given it a name which means something entirely different."
--Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities